6. Bag of cherries
Please, not chocolate-covered cherries. If Nico brandished a box of candy, she’d have to assume she’d awoken in an alternate-universe rom-com movie. Not even her mother could conspire that elaborately.
“Megan?”
No more hiding. She tucked stray hair behind her ear and swallowed so that hopefully her answer wouldn’t sound like a croak. “In here.”
The door swung open. Silhouetted by the light from the hall, Nico’s shoulders seemed broader and his hair darker than the image in her memory. Over the lunch break, neither his virility nor her susceptibility had diminished. The Latin word for manhood, virilitas , had become the English term “virility,” meaning the favorable view of masculine characteristics, especially associated with the ability to father children. And thus, with the activity traditionally required to do so. And damn, why was she overthinking?
Nico cradled a white paper bag in the bend of one arm, and a produce bag dangled from his hand. Through the clear plastic, she saw pinkish-gold Rainier cherries, the super-sweet delicate variety that had been created here in the Pacific Northwest. She loved those cherries. Their short season launched summer with days of overindulgence not surpassed until peak August corn. Her attention split down multiple tracks, her vision observing the slight curl in the hair that brushed his face, her mouth watering in anticipation of lunch, her brain cataloging synonyms for cling when she considered his thin T-shirt— outline, highlight, delineate, emphasize —but none of those responses compensated for the one thing she couldn’t force herself to do: speak.
She felt very thirsty.
“Busy while we were out?” he asked.
She managed not to glance at the couch to check if its crushed shape revealed how busy she’d been. If she answered, even to agree—or especially to agree—she had no idea what would emerge, given that her mental tangents all angled out from the intersection of Nico and sex. But crap, he was waiting for her to reply. “I, ah, got a little distracted.”
“That’s easy if you’re hungry. Here.” He handed her the paper bag. A bottle inside made it heavier than she’d expected. “Croissant sandwich and a drink.”
“Thank you.” The bag was slightly warm and released a buttery, fresh-baked aroma. She wanted to bite into it right now. “Perfect.”
“Turkey and avocado.”
“But—” Good manners and the knowledge that she could scrape off the slimy green chunks that masqueraded as a vegetable stopped her from voicing disappointment.
“Sorry, that wasn’t a very good joke.” His smile tilted, higher on one side than the other, creating a regretful look that seemed to reflect his embarrassment. “I remembered. No avocado. It’s turkey and brie. I think it also has cranberry spread.”
He had listened. A little bubble of happiness, small because it had to float up from the pit of hunger, tickled her throat as she looked into the bag. Along with the wrapped sandwich, he’d purchased a bottle of Italian sparkling water, which enticed her as much as the food, and a silver-wrapped square she recognized as an artisanal chocolate made in Portland.
“Mint chocolate, for you.”
Just for you , the fictional Mr. G had said, and Nico’s echoing words triggered her heart so forcefully that she’d swear the thudding muscle hammered through to her spine. Do it , the rapid ba-bump ordered. Ask him. Say something. She could, but more importantly, she would.
She opened her mouth, unsure how to pose her question, but knowing she had to take the chance.
Her phone chirped.
Her teeth clacked shut on the unformed request. Instead, she grabbed the familiar rectangle from where she’d left it on the arm of the couch. It filled her hand and mind with a tangible distraction that wasn’t Nico, wasn’t risky.
Naturally, the caller was the architect of this sneaky plan.
She set the lunch bag on the bare floor next to the couch while she answered. “Hello, Mother.” Despite wanting to accuse her parent of meddling, with Nico in the room, Megan could do nothing but emphasize each syllable to convey her knowledge of the subterfuge.
In front of her, Nico opened the bag of cherries.
Her brain processed a pause on the other end of the phone. Belatedly, she registered that her mother had asked about taking Callie to a spray park. “Sounds like fun,” she agreed.
During the eternity that passed while he selected a perfect fruit and lifted it to his mouth, she stared at his forearms and half listened to her mother describing the morning they’d had with Callie.
“Your daughter really knows how to have fun. You could try it sometime.”
“I am perfectly capable of having fun too.”
The dark hair that patterned his sun-bronzed skin grew denser near his wrists, but not so impenetrable as to be labeled hairy. She wished she could press her arm alongside his and compare the thick coarseness that delineated his masculinity to her own lightly freckled smoothness.
“You’re like your dad, confusing doing your job for having fun. Forty-two years and I still have to loosen him up.”
She hoped that Nico couldn’t overhear, especially after the box of costumes they’d discovered, but her mother had never learned to speak at a normal volume into a phone. “Mom, I work for a game company. They literally make fun.”
“Your misuse of that woefully overexposed word will not distract me!”
“Apologies for literally saying literally.” She knew when Nico swallowed the cherry because the column of his throat vibrated. Instead of spitting the pit into his palm, he touched his thumb and first finger to his lips, then the tip of his tongue pushed the brown seed nub into his waiting fingers. His fingers were tanned from working outside more than inside, and his nails were clean and trimmed, making it easy to assume he took care of the rest of himself too.
“Megan? You seem…distracted. Am I interrupting something?”
Busted. “Uh, not really.” No way she answered honestly, but she was a thousand percent aware that the man in front of her could hear every word she said. “Nico brought me lunch. You know Nico, don’t you?” She made sure to enunciate each word. “Your friend Greta’s son.”
The man in question grinned and slowly put another cherry in his mouth. Damn him.
“Oh, that Nico!” Her mother was an atrocious liar, all falsetto giggle and weird emphasis. “I’d heard he helped out at a moving company.” Truly atrocious.
“So he does. At the one you hired, coincidentally.”
When he plucked another cherry pit from his lips, his third finger rolled it in a slow circle against the pad of his thumb. And kept rolling it while the smile dropped from his face and his mouth flattened into a line. The only movement in the entire room seemed to be those fingers circling the cherry pit over and over. Such a tiny gesture, but it made her skin feel a size too small for her frame. All she could do, standing across the room with the phone pressed to her ear, was try to time her breathing. The high-tech weave of the shirt fabric gliding across her shoulder blades was the opposite of how she imagined the calluses on his hands would drag across her office-life-smooth skin.
“Can your father and I keep this lovely girl overnight?” Her mother’s voice intruded, almost teasing. “We’ll do an early dinner and then the swim-in movie at our complex. We’ll be wild and spontaneous.”
If she hadn’t comprehended that hiring Nico was a deliberate ploy, her mother’s emphasis on wild and spontaneous might have triggered alarms. However, the knowledge that no one was coming back to the house turned her own dial into the red zone. “Sure, that’s great.”
While she’d been listening to her mother, Nico had selected another cherry and turned to study the remaining furniture. She noticed a slight bulge in his cheek where his tongue worked at the fruit. Bulge, damn, another word that she had no business thinking, let alone checking out, but since he’d looked away from her, she could let her gaze descend to his jeans. Soft described the denim, but not the thighs covered by the faded fabric.
She managed to answer her mother’s next question barely a beat late, something about staying at the house overnight. “I’ll be fine.” Deliberate focus kept her breathing quiet and measured. “More time to get stuff done.”
“Good, you should do that.” It sounded like her mother snickered. “Get done.”
“Seriously? You have the sense of humor of a middle school boy.”
“I come by it naturally. Got it from my own sister.”
Nico held the open bag toward her, inviting her.
Her hand brushed past the thin plastic to dip into the waiting cherries. The fruit felt firm against the tips of her fingers, but she knew not to squeeze. The tender flesh of Rainiers, more delicate than the darker red variety used in pies, bruised easily, turning from palest yellow and coral pink into mottled brown. These were purely for enjoying in the moment, in excesses of seasonal gluttony. Taking one likely meant following the example of the letter writer who’d unwrapped those chocolate-covered cherries, and that was fine. Better than fine. She paused with the cherry halfway to her mouth, realizing that he was as focused on her hand as she had been on his.
“One more thing.” Her mother, almost forgotten, continued from the phone. “The movers aren’t going to be able to take the mattresses and springs to the dump until tomorrow, so you’ll still have somewhere to sleep tonight, and you have to let them in again in the morning.”
He couldn’t hear that reminder that beds waited upstairs, could he?
But of course he knew. He was the mover.
“I have to go now, okay?” While she exchanged goodbyes with her mother, Nico crossed the room to examine the wall-mounted cabinets and shelves her father had cherished. In a world with feasible real estate prices, she’d have a home office and keep the Danish Modern-style system, but her two-bedroom town house was already bursting. No matter how the wall’s worth of polished teak and clean angles begged to go with her to Seattle, her life had no space.
Nico set the bag of fruit on top of the gleaming orange-brown wood of the hanging desk. One cherry rolled out, a splash of contrasting color.
She moistened her lips.
Then he crouched to check underneath the unit. Since there was neither an ancient goddess to strike her blind for ogling the deity’s favorite young man, nor an interfering mother to embarrassingly shove her forward, she admired how the line of his spine led to the curve of his butt. Triangular holes of shredded denim marked his back pocket at the place where she assumed he often stuck a phone. The urge to insert her hand there and wiggle her fingers out between the white strings was so strong, she curled her fingers into her palm to fight it. And found the small ball of a cherry, the one she’d plucked from the bag moments ago. The one that had lost out to watching Nico.
When she bit into it, summer burst in her mouth. She twisted and pulled the stem while her teeth gripped the pit and she sucked the sweet flesh loose.
He shifted his weight and dropped a hand to his thigh to preserve his balance.
Likewise, she had to lock her knees, because she was close to trembling. The fetish for male models in crouching poses was at least as ancient as the sculptor Myron’s Discobolus statue, that naked athlete caught in the instant before he sprang upward to throw a discus. A more self-controlled woman would look out the window or maybe find a fleck of lint to remove, but even when he stood and dusted his hands on his thighs, and she knew he would turn around any moment, she couldn’t look away.
Instead of facing her, he braced both hands on the wall-mounted desk unit and pushed down, checking the strength of the brackets. “Change in plans?” After so long with her mother’s chatter at her ear, his voice was startlingly deep and slow.
“My daughter’s staying with them tonight.” Her answer felt incomplete, making her want to tack on a paragraph of explanation to fill airspace. “At their new place.”
The phone clutched close to her chest seemed to become too heavy to hold when her arm muscles morphed to spaghetti. She could leave it on the coffee table next to her lunch, or she could set it on the desk, closer to him. Her bare feet made no sound on the carpet, but she assumed he sensed her approach even though he bent to the wood surface, putting more weight on his arms. His T-shirt sleeves stretched across the trapezoids that popped into definition. She stopped close enough that she could sense his warmth. She imagined him sitting in the sun with his lunch while she’d been in here with drawn blinds and her magazine.
He took a breath and turned his head toward her. “Does that mean you’re free this evening?”
“I—” The small click as she placed her phone on the wood surface didn’t conceal the rasp of air crossing her dry lips. Full chicken-shit mode. Great. “Yes, I am.”
Now it was his turn to speak, ask her to get a drink, keep the conversation volleying, but he didn’t. He turned back to face the cabinet, and the pain that crossed his face made her look down to see if he’d banged his elbow or his shin on a corner. His eyebrows had squeezed downward hard enough that the ridge between them stood out, and his mouth and cheeks appeared to be fighting to hold something behind his teeth, maybe a groan or a cry.
She didn’t understand. Their last couple sentences replayed in her mind—no plans, Callie away, free tonight—nothing of portent, nothing there to cause this pain.
Then he took a deep breath and shuddered. When he blew out, he shook his head and then blinked several times. “This unit’s cleared out.”
His voice was a little thick and caught before the last word, but he seemed to have pushed away whatever had momentarily overtaken him.
He tapped one knuckle on the wood, the staccato rhythm mimicking her heartbeat. “We’re supposed to leave it for a specialty furniture guy coming tomorrow. Is there anything else you want help with?”
If he wanted to act like the last two minutes hadn’t happened, she could ignore them too.
“Well.” She swiveled her head and pretended to study her surroundings, but she knew what she wanted from this room: a few classic board games, the framed poster from the 1996 Imperial Tombs of China exhibit at the Portland Art Museum, and her grandfather’s tomato-red Olympia typewriter. All could easily fit into her car.
When he faced her, she automatically cataloged his body position, the way she would a model for a game avatar. He’d shifted so that his left thigh rested against the desk and he braced on his left hand, while his right arm hung loosely along his side. Near enough to another pose immortalized by Praxiteles that once again, she drowned in her newly discovered weakness: men who inadvertently stood like Hellenistic statues.
“Well?” he echoed. “Plenty of time.”
More than two thousand years before she and Nico breathed the air in this room, Aristotle had asked why people were ashamed to admit that they wanted to have sex when they didn’t feel ashamed to crave food or drink. She didn’t know the answer, but she had to try. “There is…something.”
He waited.
She wanted to believe that asking for pleasure was not more shameful than wanting a sandwich or a cool drink, not at this moment, at this place, with this man. One part of her brain told her the silence wasn’t long, but another part weighed each word before she spoke. “I think you’ve been hinting that you’re interested in…” The agony of leaping into potential embarrassment momentarily stopped her, but nine rainy Seattle months had floated past since she’d pressed hard to a body that reciprocated desire. Nine months since the wonder of skin to skin had washed through her system. She wanted contact, wanted it with him. It was as simple as that. “Interested in me. ”
Saying the words felt like plunging off a swim raft into Lake Washington, her emotions diving from the heat in her cheeks to the cold depths of her stomach. In the silence, she struggled up. “Or did I completely misinterpret?”
“No.” The low-voiced word crushed her guts into a ball of acid before the rest of his sentence penetrated. “You didn’t misinterpret. I—” He, too, paused. “I am. Interested, I mean.”
Maybe her lips parted. Maybe she breathed. Maybe she could smell the fruity essence that clung to his breath, underpinned by what might be almonds, as if he were the most delicious pastry in the case. Damn, she was hungry, hungry to her soul, so hungry and filled with so many maybes that she couldn’t be sure of anything other than how amazing his mouth looked and how ready she was to feel his lips touch hers.
“I’ve been interested since the front door opened.” He’d come so close that the flutters of air from his speech crossed her lips, matching the flutters in her stomach. “The woman standing there looked like she was straight out of a shampoo ad, ponytail and all, except for one thing.” His finger hovered near her elbow. “This. Assassin cult?”
She glanced down at the reminder she’d jotted inside her forearm hours ago. The skin underneath was so pale that she could see the veins pulsing inches from his touch.
Her move.
She kissed him.
She wanted to know the angles and planes that made him, and she began with his mouth. His lips were infinitely more yielding than the marble masterpieces of her imagination. He let her take his upper lip between both of hers to explore the dip in the center, the softness where the edges curved upward, the stubble on his chin where it rubbed hers. He tasted like chocolate, hinting that he’d already had one of the square candies he’d brought her. How could kissing, merely kissing, activate the nerves in her breasts, the flutter in her stomach, the tiny muscles tightening in the arches of her feet? How could she have all these sensations from one simple kiss?
Then he eased back to look into her eyes while his hands settled above her hips. “Nice.”
“Yes.” She sensed his thumbs brush the waistband of her shorts, back and forth between her skin and the denim. She wasn’t going another nine months without this feeling, not even another nine seconds. She reached for his shoulders. “Try again?”
His chest inflated with an indrawn breath, and she had an unexpected premonition that he would say no, but then he nodded. “Absolutely.”
This time, neither of them held back. Her hands grabbed fistfuls of his shirt while their bodies angled to find the tightest alignment. His chest crushed her breasts, her bare legs entwined with his denim-covered ones, and even her toes tangled with his shoelaces as she scrambled over the tops of his shoes, until she didn’t think they could squeeze any more snugly together, not unless they stripped. She dug her fingertips into his dense shoulder muscles, the cotton of his shirt a barrier she wanted to disappear, while his lips found the juncture where her neck met her collarbone. Sensation radiated so many waves through her chest, through veins and nerves, through her thighs down to her wobbly knees, that she feared collapsing before they reached the stage of skin to skin. Her hands snaked under his sleeves, and she tried to wrap her hands around his biceps.
“Here.” Taking charge, he turned them until the wooden doors of a cabinet pressed against the back of her thighs. He lifted her to her tiptoes before he suddenly bent low enough to put his shoulders even with her waist, wrapping his hands behind her thighs while she gripped his shoulders. “Okay to lift you?”
He meant to set her on the top of the built-in cupboard. Desire flashed through her so hard, she gasped. To be sitting raised in front of him, high enough to have his face pressed to her breasts, became what she wanted more than anything. To own all his attention. To be his focus, his feast, his goddess. She gasped, “Yes,” and then she was up, her head higher than his even when he straightened.
His touch fell to the bare skin below the edge of her shorts. He urged her to part her thighs, letting him step between while he ran his palms upward, crossing the denim, passing her waist, rubbing the slick fabric of her shirt across her stomach until he circled her breasts.
If only their shirts would disappear and leave their skin for each other. She thrust her breasts high while she bent back her head until it stopped at the wall behind her.
Look at me. Touch me. Bare me.
He understood what she didn’t have to say. “Can I take this off?”
The redundancy, when she’d arched her body like an invitation, made her moan even as the question fired her need. “Yes.”
Somehow, putting her shirt back on this morning had led to this moment where she could watch him wrap his fingers in the blue fabric and lift it, his knuckles rubbing hard over her breasts as he raised the hem. She urged him on by lifting her arms. In the instant when her shirt veiled her face, she understood that she wanted to do nothing but be worshipped. She wanted to feel, but not have to think or plan, just feel .
Then he freed her and dropped her shirt to the floor. His hands spread across her bare stomach. She’d missed having a man handle her body, having big hands span her waist, feeling adored and delicate when a man touched her.